What went wrong with World of Warcraft? An article I made.

[Raven]

The players ruined WoW. All features added were shit people wanted and cried for on the forums.

[Mimma]

The social aspect of the game is underestimated - and completely gone in retail.

Retail vanilla was a family game. I played with my wife - our friends played with their son and daugther. Our guild was filled with likewise people. The chat was social, cozy - sometimes also heated and full of drama - but mostly fun and enjoying. We were friends, we had IRL meetings - travelling thousands of kilometers to visit eachother.

Retail today completely lacks the social network. It is not needed anymore: LFM, LFR, connected realms, guilds used for gold collection ... everything eliminated the need for a guild and eventually people dropped off.

[Undertanker]

8 of the 10 people in the company I worked for at the time played together in the same guild. So we made up 25% of our 40 man raids.

Wanna know what we talked about at work?

Hours upon hours of our previous raid night, getting different points of view, how we can improve, how messed up on what.

I really felt bad for those 2 who didn't play. They had to listen to us all day with confusion and pretty much nothing to add to any conversation.

[writtengamer]

The social aspect of the game is underestimated - and completely gone in retail.

Retail vanilla was a family game. I played with my wife - our friends played with their son and daugther. Our guild was filled with likewise people. The chat was social, cozy - sometimes also heated and full of drama - but mostly fun and enjoying. We were friends, we had IRL meetings - travelling thousands of kilometers to visit eachother.

Retail today completely lacks the social network. It is not needed anymore: LFM, LFR, connected realms, guilds used for gold collection ... everything eliminated the need for a guild and eventually people dropped off.

I wrote a lot about this in the article, it was probably the biggest point I was trying to make.

[melak]

The players ruined WoW. All features added were shit people wanted and cried for on the forums.

You cant blaim it 100% on the players, Blizzard also had their own ideas of how to make it more casual and grab more cash. I remember them saying back in vanilla that you would never see in game shop, level boosts etc

[Arucado]

Wow is not ruined, stop comparing Vanilla with Retail, they are different games, some enjoy retail, some enjoy vanilla. Honestly, vanilla has its problems too, however im one of those who wants to play here, and i dont enjoy retail anymore at all.

What actually you will never understand is that despite of how good vanilla can be, it is a game without progress anymore, most people who play retail it is because it gets constantly updated. If you keep years doing the same raids with the same content, gets boring.

Most of us don't get bored maybe because addiction, nostalgia or the feelings whatever u wanna call it, but opening threads talking about how shitty retail has become is really stupid because there are still million people who enjoy the game

[phyriel]

The game has expanded its playable classes and homogenized them to MAJOR fault.

There is definitely a massive difference in class design from Vanilla to retail. They sacrificed fun and uniqueness among the classes, to achieve better balance. The pursuit of balance ruins games IMO.

I agree, it was always quite understandable for me that as a mage for example you gotta be outsmarting your opponent so its like cc/master control class and for example warrior is rather limitted meatshield that get down to the buisness and hopes for the best, massive damage but tunnel vision, its either one way or another.

Further versions of wow made it that every class can be self sustaining, mobile, having sort of hard cc... which just turned it into more of a dragon ball universe where shit can fly and fart atomic bombs.

[writtengamer]

Wow is not ruined, stop comparing Vanilla with Retail, they are different games, some enjoy retail, some enjoy vanilla. Honestly, vanilla has its problems too, however im one of those who wants to play here, and i dont enjoy retail anymore at all.

What actually you will never understand is that despite of how good vanilla can be, it is a game without progress anymore, most people who play retail it is because it gets constantly updated. If you keep years doing the same raids with the same content, gets boring.

Most of us don't get bored maybe because addiction, nostalgia or the feelings whatever u wanna call it, but opening threads talking about how shitty retail has become is really stupid because there are still million people who enjoy the game

I opened the thread to share my article and opinion and get some feedback, in which I touch on a lot of things you just said.

[Ayumi]

Wow is not ruined, stop comparing Vanilla with Retail, they are different games, some enjoy retail, some enjoy vanilla. Honestly, vanilla has its problems too, however im one of those who wants to play here, and i dont enjoy retail anymore at all.

What actually you will never understand is that despite of how good vanilla can be, it is a game without progress anymore, most people who play retail it is because it gets constantly updated. If you keep years doing the same raids with the same content, gets boring.

"What you will never understand"...
You are just stating the obvious. Don't know what you're getting at.
But thanks for enlightening us. I didn't know vanilla was actually finite.

[Arx_1]

"I think Blizzard is right. They are right when they say players don’t want the old WoW back, with all its flaws. Nostalgia, as it tends to do, has distorted people’s memories, leaving them only with the good ones, while forgetting the bad. The pure chaos of 40 man raids,the horrible itemization, the imbalanced classes, the abominable PvP, just to name a few. They know players wouldn’t stand for all those thing returning."

OP is either retarded or trolling; I think the first is more likely.

In any case, we don't give a fuck what went wrong with WoW. At this stage, the only people concerned with that should be game historians.

WoW retail is past the stage of being "repairable", which is why we want the original and the first two expansions back.